Genre: Crime

The 12-step programme is done differently in Norway: Inspector Harry Hole has taken to dosing himself with smuggled opium to aid his recovery from alcoholism. This is the sixth Hole novel and the author seems compelled to come up with these increasingly unlikely ways of making his maverick cop’s behaviour ever more outlandish. Nesbø is such a terrific action writer that one’s heart leaps when the running-about starts; but that’s partly because it shuts Harry up for a bit.

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There are very few atmospheric locales left unused in crime fiction, but Griffiths’ evocation of coastal Norfolk’s bleak landscape in her Ruth Galloway series is impressive enough not to sit in the shadow of P D James’s masterly Devices and Desires. Griffiths’s plots are conventional but well-turned, and I wish her grown-up, light-footed depiction of the dilemmas of forensic archaeologist Ruth was emulated more widely.

Moonlight Mile

by Dennis Lehane

Little, Brown, £15.99

Lehane’s thrillers mix viscerally violent excitement with a thorough airing of ethical dilemmas: imagine an episode of The Moral Maze in which Michael Portillo talks entirely in wisecracks before shooting Michael Buerk in the kneecap. In Nineties novel Gone, Baby, Gone, private eye Patrick Kenzie was faced with doing the right thing or the legal thing after uncovering the identity of a little girl’s kidnapper; this smashing sequel dissects his choice’s belated consequences.

Darkside

by Belinda Bauer

Bantam, £12.99

For her debut novel Blacklands, in which a boy corresponds with the jailed paedophile who killed his uncle decades earlier, Bauer recently won crime fiction’s top prize, the Gold Dagger. Happily the dark horse is not a one-trick pony: her second book, though less original, is even more accomplished. Her sleepy Somerset setting, plagued by a serial killer targeting the infirm and elderly, is depicted with a wit and warmth that makes the macabre bits seem all the more horrible.